But the program is way behind schedule: the government says it needs housing for 60,000 families, but has so far identified only 10,000 places.
"Condominiums are the next step," said Omar Boraie, Spring Street Plaza's developer, "because the downtown needs housing for people to stay in town, spend money and energize the city".
SBJ is taking the position that it is meeting another important need: housing for older residents.
Shows can have casts of as many as 40 people, most from New York City, who need housing for as long as 16 weeks, Mr. McMahon said.
Need housing for the night: six men, either shirtless and moist or sweating through their shirts; carrying instruments, some of them large; unlikely to stay still for long periods of time.
Melinda Hamilton, mayor of Sunnyvale, said the new project "has more community support because it's more in tune with the neighborhood, and it provides what we need: housing for families".
The city would build 66 owner-occupied town houses on the gardens, providing badly needed housing for residents of the Morrisania neighborhood who otherwise might never own their own homes, said Carol Abrams, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
The developer, Gerald Migdol, said that the rooming house was legal, and would provide needed housing "for the working poor and working lower-middle-class people who couldn't afford a market-rate one- or two-bedroom".
"We need housing for people who are not in the upper-income categories, and the place to do that is in the older downtowns" with multi-family housing, she said, and on land that can be redeveloped from other uses.
It's not gardeners and other environmentalists who have prevented the city from building needed housing for low-income people, the elderly and the homeless; it's New York City's lack of interest in building housing that neighborhood residents want.
"Once we develop a bioscience cluster, it will spill over into the general business community along the Route 110 corridor and we will need housing for them," Ms. Kamer said.
